The news is out: IDAGIO raised €8 million. I’m stoked to be on board for this phase and consider myself lucky every day that I get to work with this amazing team to give shape to classical music online. 🎻

Next week is the last MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE for 2017. I will be traveling around Cuba, where internet access is not a given, and I won’t be online much or at all until the second week of January. 🏝️

And what a crazy week: Shazamsold to Apple, YouTube is working on a Spotifycompetitor, Spotify’s share swap with Tencent went through, and Bitcoin just keeps on rising. 💸

There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.

CD Baby CEO Tracy Maddux: “The next time you hear an industry pundit decry the low per stream payouts from YouTube, consider who the source is and who is really threatened by access, transparency, diversity of art and competition for fans worldwide.”

I have been saying for a while that Instagram is the next big social network for music, and will fill a space that Soundcloud and others haven’t been able to fill. It’s doing that already, and we’ve seen nothing yet.

Interesting news and could have an impact on “artist apps” - a service offered by more than a few platforms. They take templates, let artists customise, and then help you bring it to the App Store. Apple says: no more.

Likely outcome: more artist chatbots through platforms like POP, The Bot Platform, Chatfuel, and Octane.

The latest advance from DeepMind behaves in a very surprising way. Expect other AI systems to be just as odd. (seriously - what’s happening here is really important and will impact music in more ways than we can imagine)

Jaron Lanier is one of virtual reality’s most recognizable figures. He’s credited with popularizing the term itself. Interesting interview, which includes this link of a video in which Lanier plays music from inside VR: in the 80s!